Data Compression

Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field since data kept on hard drives is usually compressed to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is much better than alternative algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need much less space and are generated a lot faster, which allows us to store multiple daily backups of your files and databases.